


Sanctuary (a Feral Tale)

by glitterandrocketfuel



Series: The Feral AU [2]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Hallmark movie schmaltz, M/M, Omegaverse, a/b/o dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:14:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21982741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterandrocketfuel/pseuds/glitterandrocketfuel
Summary: On the way to a post-Thanksgiving gig several states away, the FOB van hits a patch of ice and crashes into a snow bank. Though nobody is seriously hurt, the van is un-drivable for several days, and the nearest town they can get to is a place called Cookietown.Everyone has been expecting Patrick to claim Pete as his omega, but Patrick is terrified of doing things wrong--he already knows he's not the right kind of alpha, and he never wanted to claim, bind, or trap Pete, and he's not ready to pin down Pete in any way (except for sexy reasons). He knows he's "not enough alpha" to put Pete "in his place."It's gonna take a Hallmark-movie miracle to get these two to realize that you make your own holiday miracles.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Series: The Feral AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582426
Comments: 32
Kudos: 51
Collections: Have Yourself Some Merry Little Peterick 2019





	1. This Story's Going Somewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littlesnowpea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlesnowpea/gifts), [laudanum_cafe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laudanum_cafe/gifts).



> This story takes place after Valentine's day and before the final epilogue of the main Feral story. Huge thanks to the discord pack and the Peterick Creations Challenge crew for the cheerleading and brainstorming!

"Welp. We're fucked." Andy dropped the hood of the van and it thunked closed over the hissing radiator. Big fat snowflakes plopped down all around them, vaporizing out of existence when they hit the overheated engine of the van.

Joe was nodding, his cell phone pressed to one ear while he dabbed a cut on his forehead with his hoodie sleeve. "I think mile marker sixty-nine was the last one we passed."

"It was eighty-eight, you idiot," Patrick yelled from underneath Pete. "And let me up, you other idiot." They were sprawled on the ground outside the open side door of the van. Patrick had a cut on his temple and Pete had blood on his mouth from the cut on Patrick's temple because he kept fucking kissing it better and Patrick was very certain this was not in any approved first-aid practice manual.

"Not a chance, lunchbox. You're staying still until I'm absolutely certain that nothing is broken, busted, or even so much as bruised. In the meantime, I'm kissing all your boo-boos." For emphasis, Pete smacked his lips over the cut on Patrick's temple again. He also wriggled on top of him, further aggravating the very inappropriate trauma-boner that had risen inside of Patrick's (wet-assed) jeans as soon as he realized that he'd scooted over on the seat to suck some heat from Pete and the glass and metal of the crash bent into the space he'd occupied moments before.

"My ass is soaking wet. Kiss that and warm me up!"

"With relish!" Pete grinned a bloody-toothed grin down at him. "You're all right? You're really okay?"

"Well sixty-nine's the last mile marker I remember!" Joe yelled. 

"You always remember sixty-nine. It's the only number you remember." Andy, meanwhile, had been walking to the curve in the road. "It says the Coketown exit is two miles ahead."

Joe stuck a finger in his free ear. "Okay Coketown? No--oh." He covered the phone with his hand and called back to Andy. "Pretty sure it isn't Coketown, buddy. Put your glasses on!"

Andy brought the pieces of his glasses up into the air. "You mean these glasses?" Broken along the bridge a few minutes ago when the van had hit a patch of black ice, and physics had stopped working as expected long enough to pull them off the road into the ditch. "Oh! Wait--it's Cooketown? No Cookie-town. No shit, Joey. Cookietown."

Joe, clearly still certain that Andy's vision was permanently damaged, shrugged and spoke into the phone. "Cookietown? I know it sounds crazy but--no, wait, you're serious? Man, please tell me they're not named after something they banned inside the city limits, haha. Okay, twenty minutes. We'll try not to freeze until then."

"Speak for yourself," Patrick yelled, still trapped under Pete. But he gazed up into Pete's eyes and saw the shadows of real fear still lingering. "I'm okay, Pete. And so are you."

**

Pete wouldn't deny he was twitchy. Who wouldn't be, after a trauma like a car crash? For a split second, his world cracked open and he couldn't even breathe when he realized the chunk of metal from the van had gone deep into the seat cushion of where Patrick had been sitting just a moment before. If Pete hadn't been teasing him with thigh squeezes...if Patrick had jerked away instead of surging forward to smother Pete with his body mass...if Patrick had growled for distance instead of purred for closeness--

Crammed into the local tow truck between Patrick and Joe while Andy sat up front with the driver, Pete shivered and couldn't stop the cold that seeped into his bones. It settled in right next to the twinges that for now thrummed somewhere near his tailbone, but wouldn't stay so quiescent in the next few days.

Even though he had an alpha to hand, a good portion of Pete still panicked when his body reminded him of who he was. Too many years of hiding and--and trying. Trying to be something he was not.

Until Patrick.

Now, the band was starting to come together, worlds better than their first disastrous gigs together, Pete's parents, his friends, his siblings, all expected Pete to "settle down" now that an alpha had appeared to "take him in hand." Even the woman on the night shift at the convenience store where used to buy his cheese-and-crackers packs to make it through heats in his old squat now asked after his "sweet alpha boyfriend." 

And okay, so the squat was now a real nest (and their practice space, and the space where he and Patrick sometimes gave each other long and lazy handjobs out of boredom while talking about the unforgivable schmaltz of made-for-TV Omega Channel movies). Pete didn't have to wrestle with his own body anymore when the moon came out (he did, however, wrestle with Patrick's body rather frequently, and Patrick had a perpetual bruise in the form of Pete's teeth in the meatiest part of his right buttcheek to prove it). But neither did his body quiet down from the feral restlessness that seemed to crest during full moons and heats.

It seemed like everybody was waiting for Patrick to fix him, but they all forgot that Pete was un-fixable.

Up front, Andy was asking the wrecker driver about the town's name, and the driver was more than happy to satisfy his curiosity. "Town used to be named after the family that owned the factory where errybody worked. But then they pulled up stakes and moved overseas and left everybody without jobs for darn near twenny years. So we took the name of the town away from 'em. But that all changed when Guy Fieri came to visit Aunt Portia's bakery."

"Wait--the Mayor of Flavortown visited here?" Joe perked up. "Guys, we gotta go!"

The driver laughed. "Yeah, Aunt Portia's put us back on the map. Fact is, you folks are lucky because she only opens to the public for the holiday season. Every other month, it's bulk and online orders only. But she put the town back to work. We can't name the town 'Aunt Portia' on account of the ordinance saying we ain't never gonna name the town after people again, so we re-named it 'Cookietown' in honor of the cookies that saved our jobs."

"What kind of cookies does she make?" Patrick asked. Sounding normal. Sounding okay.

Pete let the conversation drift over his head, ignoring the words but listening to Patrick's voice. The world passing by through the window wasn't spinning, but his insides still were. But focusing on the outside is what allowed him to see the small wooden sign just past the green highway exit sign. 

His eyes were drawn to the gold-painted Omega symbol. "Sanctuary, 3.5 mi," and an arrow pointing to the left. His hand tightened reflexively on Patrick's knee and he pointed.

By agreement, they didn't say anything out loud. In the past year or so, having extended their reach outside Chicago, they had some reality-lessons about the surrounding towns and states, and those lessons usually showed them just how much influence Concordance had in a lot of places, even though the larger cities like Chicago had been shaking off their influence like a t-shirt from an underground band that had sold out to go mainstream.

The sign appeared again, in slightly larger lettering at the exit. The driver caught sight of it and harrumphed. "Not that I mind it--place brought business to town and all--but it just doesn't seem as efficient as getting the old hotel cleaned up. Now that--that's bringing the town back."

Beside him, Patrick's expression went carefully neutral. "It's a Sanctuary?"

"Old Boy Scout camp from before the changewave messed everybody up but good. But who wants to run around in the woods all het up on heat hormones?" He scratched under his trucker hat (a dirty gray, otherwise Pete would have found a way to steal it for Patrick, but Patrick looked better in yellows and greens. And blues and reds. And--) "Much as they try, it's all just cabins and outhouses. Good enough for huntin' deer but not for huntin' ass." He grinned at Andy.

Pete kept his mouth shut and a firm grip on Patrick's arm, even though he felt the low purr begin in his best friend's diaphragm.

Andy sniffed and said it for him. "I think a natural setting would be a great place to spend a heat or a rut in peace."

"I guess if you like being lonely." The driver shook his head. "Not gonna lie, you young'uns have it easier, growin' up with that extra sense of smell. In my day, we had to just guess if a girl liked us enough to drop her gutchies in the back of the Chevy."

Pete risked a glance over at Joe. The big-haired guitarist had the most carefully-schooled expression of neutrality on his face and Pete almost lost it when he spoke. "I understand," he said solemnly, "that gutchie-dropping was a much more fraught endeavor in the good old days."

Pete felt nails dig into his thigh from the other side and turned to see Patrick wearing a stern expression that said, Don't you dare...

Pete dared. "My boys and I are in a band, sir, and we'd love to hear about, uh, gutchie-dropping before the changewave."

The driver laughed. "You play guitars? That'd pretty much do it in my day. Fella with a guitar didn't have to do much more than strum a few chords. Didn't even need a singin' voice."

"Oh, we've got one of those," Pete said, clapping his hand around Patrick's shoulder. "This here's our singer. Trick's our golden ticket with his pipes."

The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. "Yeah? Well good on ya, Porkchop. Ladies love a gent who can croon."

Patrick glared at Pete again. And Pete dared again. "Oh, the fellas love him, too."

"Ah--er, right. I guess that's what the kids are doing these days with all yer smellin' each other's butts."

Joe's eyes grew three times the size of his face. "Oh, yes sir," he said. "But we had butt-smelling classes in high school, so we know how to smell butts the right way."

In the front, Andy decided to be the grown-up and sighed. "Older people in my family were pretty shaken up by the changewave, sir. There were a lot of people's long-held opinions about who belonged with whom that had to be changed."

The driver sighed. "Heh. Yeah. I guess you're right, kid. But you young folk got to keep in mind that gutchie-droppin's one thing, but who you're gonna spend your life with is another. Good relationships are built on more than just butt-smelling, and that ain't changed."

"No, sir, that surely hasn't changed at all," Joe said.

The two-lane highway off the interstate bobbed up and down before them, dotted with faded signs for gas and the town, and one fresh, new "Alpha Country" billboard for the car dealership showcasing big pick-up trucks, along with an array of inexplicably photo-bombing big cats of various species.

The town turned out to be little more than a wide spot in the road with one traffic light. The four corners of the intersection were locked up with a gingerbread Victorian building with an old-fashioned "Rooms To Let" sign lettered on a wooden board hung over the porch and an Historic Landmark sign next to the sidewalk. The Federal style building directly across from it had a gold-lettered "City Hall" over the eaves. The third corner held a wooden clapboard historic building that looked like it had once been a stable and an empty lot behind it.

The wrecker driver waited for the chain-link fence gate to open, then pulled into the lot, their van bouncing behind it. Tires crunched over the gravel as he pulled up next to the modern garage behind the historic building. "Y'all wanna go on over to the drugstore across the street. They got a lunch counter and the Butterworth girl'll get you set up with something to warm your bones while I take a look at your vehicle."

Andy climbed out of the truck. "We appreciate your help. Mind if we collect some things first?"

The driver motioned. "Be my guest. We'll get you back on the road."

Patrick made a beeline for the back doors of the van and pulled out his guitar case and gym bag. Pete left his bass but found his notebook, the book he'd been reading, his chargers, and a watch cap with cupcake icing smeared across the brim. He jammed the watch cap down on Patrick's head. "You'll catch cold."

He used the brief contact to breathe in Patrick's alpha scent. Patrick turned his head towards him. "You okay?"

Pete nodded, not feeling it.

Patrick didn't believe it, either, but he let it pass, tugging on the sleeve of Pete's coat. "Come on, let's get warm."

Joe pointed to the smokestack a few blocks up the road. "Are there cookies coming out of that thing? I was promised cookies. Flavortown cookies."

The driver chuckled. "Yeah, Aunt Portia's'll open their doors to the town at seven tonight."

Andy guided Joe towards the sidewalk. "Soup now, cookies later."

As they crossed the street, Joe pointed again. "Andy, are my eyes deceiving me or is that the greatest sign ever?"

Andy held up the pieces of his glasses again. "Thanks for reminding me, asshole."

Pete looked up and burst out laughing. Beside him, Patrick pulled out his phone to snap a picture. "That one's going in the scrapbook." He showed the phone picture to the visually-impaired Andrew before slipping it back into his pocket.

The Butterworth family had undoubtedly faithfully served the town's health needs for generations, judging by the age of the soda fountain counter seen through the window. But the age of the sign above the awning hadn't held up as well, and the "-erworth" had fallen into disrepair over time, leaving the town's general store and diner advertising itself as "Butt Drugs."

"I bet they aren't limited to butt drugs," Patrick said. "We could see if they have eyeglass repair kits, too."

"Get your head checked out, too, my dude." Joe tweaked Patrick's hat. 

"They'll still need butt drugs for that," Pete said, hooking his fingers into the belt loops of Patrick's jeans as they piled up on each other in front of the door while Andy pulled it open.

"Butt _head_ drugs for you, then, Wentz," Patrick retorted.

The four of them were still laughing when they entered the warm, soup-and-antiseptic scented air of the store and almost half the heads there rose to attention. The underlying scent of other alphas hit him and Pete visibly reacted. His fists clenched at his sides. Fuck his stupid biology. 

Joe moved up to the front of their little pack, placing his body in front of Pete's. Pete wanted to shove the younger man back behind him--it wasn't Joe's job to play offense, it was Pete's. Patrick's purr warbled up to the back of his throat and he moved in close to Pete's back.

A woman near the front door groaned, her table full of kids echoing the disappointed noise. "Settle down, half-pints. They're not the cookie lady."

"Cookie lady?" Joe asked no one in particular. The rest of the patrons who'd looked up with predatory interest turned back to their meals or their companions. "Apparently, the world's not waiting for four tired boys in a van."

Patrick's purr turned into a hum. "We've been down, we've been out, we've been hanging around, but no cookies in any direction, whoa..."

Pete snorted into the back of Joe's jacket. 

"Y'all can have a seat anywhere and I'll be right with you." A young woman in a light blue waitress's uniform called out from where she distributed plates to the patrons in a booth near the back. Pete caught a look at them in the mirror above the lunch counter, tilted downward to display the store on the other side of the half-wall that separated the diner from the drugstore. Joe had dirt on his face, Patrick's sideburns were still blood-stained from the cut on his head and they all had wet patches and dirt on their clothes. I wouldn't serve us, either. 

He tugged his hoodie down tighter and shook his bangs further into his face and felt for his wallet. He was going to have to call Marcus and the insurance company and his parents and everyone would be disappointed because Pete should have been in hand by now and if he hadn't been poking at Patrick--

Patrick prodded him from behind and Pete shuffled forward. "That booth, right there," Patrick murmured, the underlying thrum twisting around the shaky parts of Pete and sticking his feet to the ground. All the same, he wouldn't mind turning around and heading back to that brown and gold sign pointing towards the road out of town.

**  
Patrick watched Pete while Pete thought he wasn't watching, and pretended like he wasn't watching Pete when Pete was watching him. He felt like he had to look after Pete in strange places sometimes.

He leaned his guitar case against the edge of a booth about midway back. Brass poles shot up from the edges of all the booths and sprouted coat hooks. He could already tell Pete was about to make a pole-dancing reference "In you go," he said, and shoved Pete into the booth. 

They faced the door so they could see out into the festively-decorated main drag of town while Joe and Andy could see further into the drugstore-slash-lunch counter. Pete had the contents of his wallet out and was sorting through crumpled receipts and

Andy drummed his hands on the table in a random rhythm and Patrick joined in until Joe put his hand over Andy's. "Dude, you're hurt," he said, his voice going suddenly wobbly.

Andy's knuckles were scraped and red and he stared down at them with a puzzled expression. "Huh," he said.

Suddenly, it hit Patrick. The van had crashed. The van had crashed. When he blinked, he saw the twisted metal of the window frame, poking into the upholstery of the seat right next to his pillow. "Um," he said. "Is--is everybody okay?" His breaths started to thicken. "W-we should--we should call, um, somebody?"

Joe met his eyes and it felt like one of those endless moments. He could see Joe thinking real hard behind the bright blues. Joe's parents and Patrick's mom had both logged protests at taking a road trip in the tour van over Christmas break. The van, the weather, the whole idea of heading for a recording session at a place they didn't know of because Pete found a dude on the internet who said he'd hook them up--Patrick, are you sure you're gonna let him do this? was said a lot around certain parts of the Chicago softcore scene.

The first few times, it made him laugh. "Let" Pete. Until it stopped being kidding. Beside him, Pete squirmed, feeling around in his hoodie for something.

The waitress chose that moment to slide into their peripheral vision. "Hey boys. Y'all need something to warm up?"

To Patrick, her voice came from a long ways away and sounded like the protest of bending metal and tires jerking across ice and pavement. But he didn't remember Andy yelling "Do you have anything vegan?" during the sudden jerk and even more terrifying slide of the van going out of control.

Joe kicked him under the table. "Dude? Coffee or Mountain Dew?"

Patrick blinked. "Uh, yes?"

"Get him a coffee and a chicken sandwich," Pete said, from the end of a long tunnel of snow. "Extra fries."

The waitress disappeared (more likely, she stepped away while Patrick was having his internal freak-out) and he gradually became aware that Pete was on his phone talking to someone--probably Marcus--and had emptied the contents of his wallet's ID case for the insurance card. Beyond Pete, Joe and Andy were taking turns telling Pete their versions of what actually happened and Patrick heard the squeal of bent metal again and slammed his eyes shut again.

_Pete was poking him and he was trying to sleep. Just a nap, dammit, all he wanted. They'd already woken him up early at the rest stop ("Next one isn't for 63 more miles, Patrick. Go now or hold it for an hour!" and Patrick wasn't in love with holding it), now he was finally getting comfortable between the blast of hot, dry air from the heater and the cool moisture from the window. Unfortunately, Pete was poking the over-cooked side of him._

_But he'd already lashed out twice and that wasn't working. His sleepy mind suggested that maybe Pete, smelling sweeter than usual even through the unwashed-boy stink, might need to be put in his place. You're the alpha, Patrick's older brother had told him. You better start acting like it._

_Patrick had scoffed at the time but when it was dark and the road was nothing but cornfields and asphalt, Kevin's words came back to haunt him. Maybe Pete would be better off with a good, strong alpha who knew just how to hold him down in order to sink teeth into that spot near the back of his neck instead of Patrick, who nosed his way up and hummed melodies in order to get there._

_Pete poked again. Goddammit, that's it, Patrick thought, and launched himself into Pete, mouth already open, tongue ready to taste, and teeth itching to bite. Then the sickening weightlessness, the disorienting turn, and suddenly he found himself not on top of Pete, but in the well between the seats, his head still ringing from the blow against the metal frame beneath the back of the bench seat and Pete crushing his ribs with one knee and two elbows. Patrick? Pete's lips against his temple and something warm and liquid thick tickling his sideburns. Patrick Patrick PatrickPatrickPatrick oh God please don't be--please be okay--"_

_"Please don't leave_ \--

"Patrick! Pat--"

"--rick? Rick!" Joe slapped his hand on the table, jolting Patrick out of the flashback.

Heat raced through him, along with the stubborn sense that Pete still needed to be put in his place and at the same time, being repelled by the thought. He blinked at Joe, who was staring at him with a worried expression on his face. "What?" he ground out irritably. "Quit hitting things."

Beside him, Pete growled and Patrick's nostrils flared. "Not you too," he said tightly.

Andy held up his hands. "Patrick, you checked out for like, ten whole minutes."

Patrick looked at them and wondered how they could be such dummies. "Uhh, we were in an accident?"

Joe and Andy shared a look. And then they had the gall to share it with Pete. "Definitely checked out," Joe said.

Patrick rolled his eyes. Bright flashes jerked his attention to the left and right, but it must have been some...something else. Twisted metal, sickening weightlessness, back to earth with a teeth-rattling jolt.

Pete's fingers dug into his thigh. Patrick jumped and hissed. "I swear to fuck, Pete--"

"You did it again," Pete said.

Something about the light was bothering him. "Did what? What the hell are you guys babbling about? I swear, if I have to do everything--"

"No two ways about it. Checked out. The sooner, the better," Andy said. "Pete?"

"Agreed."

"Listen, you assholes, I may be a little distracted--"

"Patrick!" Pete snapped. Actually snapped, and not in the playful way he usually did.

"What?" He snapped right back. His chest rumbled and he coughed. Really? Now is when I decide to purr? Only what came out wasn't quite the same soothing noise.

Pete's eyes widened, then narrowed. As Patrick's gaze darted to Joe and then Andy, he saw the same troubled expressions on their faces. He sucked in a breath, stopping the rumble in his throat for a moment. "What?" he repeated.

Pete shifted away from him.

_Shifted away, towards the window. "God, dude, would you stop? Yes, you can have the Red Vines, just get the fuck off me and let me sleep."_

_The fwwip of his bag zipper being opened, crackle of plastic packaging, sharp smell of artificial strawberry, cold window glass pressed against his cheek, upholstered armrest digging into his ribs, hot palm resting on his knee, sliding up his thigh, digging into the frayed fibers at the edge of his pocket where a hole was starting in his jeans, hot fingers on his bare skin and somebody needs to put that man in his place--_

_Sickening weightlessness. He dug his fingers into anything he could reach, just to keep from flying out into empty space._

_Screech of metal. Hard slam into the back of his head._

_No breath. Ears ringing. Pete's hands not just in the hole but everywhere on his body. Pete's lips at his ear. Patrickpatrickpatrick, pleasepleasepleasebeokay_

_Pleasedon'tleave--_

_\--me_.

"--me? Patrick, can you hear me?"

Patrick landed back in his body with a jolt, this time courtesy of Pete next to him. "Whaaat!"

Pete, Joe, and Andy all stared at him. After a tense moment, Andy said softly, "Patrick, you're smushing your chicken sandwich."

"With your bare hands," Joe added.

Patrick blinked. He looked down. His hands were covered in flakes of chicken breading, ketchup staining his fingers and knuckles like a crime scene. "When did the food get here?"

**

Pete left Andy and Joe with a few bills to pay for the meal and shoved Patrick out of the booth. "Come on. We're not waiting any longer." 

He dragged Patrick to the restrooms in the back and made the younger man wash his hands. Then Pete took a wad of damp paper towels and started dabbing at the cut on the side of his head. With his hat on, Patrick's hair had obscured the damage, but when Pete dabbed at it, he flinched.

Pete's gut curled. "I'm sorry," he said. Seemed like he was always apologizing. "You're kinda scaring me."

Patrick pushed his hands away. "What about you? Are you okay? I promised I'd look out for you, you know."

Pete scowled. "We look out for each other. But you--" He searched Patrick's face for an answer that wasn't there. "Where did you keep slipping off to?" Patrick just looked back at him, his eyes huge and luminous in the wood-paneled bathroom's weak light. And slightly unfocused.

"I'm--I'm fine."

"Strangling your chicken sandwich is not fine, Patrick." He cupped his alpha's face and tried not to think that Patrick might be unconsciously strangling him. "Look. We're going to go out of here and to the pharmacy desk and get you looked at." If I hadn't been bothering him--

Patrick sagged against the sink. "This is my fault. We're sort of on a timeline here."

Pete hefted a hearty mental fuck you to his biology. "That's my problem, not yours." It wasn't exactly true--Patrick always tried to avoid assuming anything about Pete's heats and Pete was getting sick of having to drag Patrick into his nest because Patrick didn't want to 'presume' even though Pete declared numerous times that Patrick belonged there (even once going so far as to write on his own belly with a Sharpie "In case of heat, call Patrick Stump" and Patrick's phone number written in a little speech bubble coming out of his bat heart tattoo). "As long as you're around, it won't be a problem for either of us." He tilted Patrick's chin up and grinned. "If you can keep up, that is."

"You say that now," Patrick grumbled. But he tilted his head up and pressed his lips against Pete's. Just for a minute, before a voice came too close outside the bathroom door and they sprang apart.


	2. My place is nowhere you should roam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Small-town drama, big dreams, and impromptu acoustics. What else is there to do when you're stranded in a one-horse town?

Mr. Butterworth the pharmacist did, in fact, have Mrs. Butterworth, who was _not_ a syrup bottle, but who _was_ a retired RN, check Patrick out and confirm a mild concussion and a little bit of shock that a good night's sleep and some Advil would take care of. He also had an eyeglass repair kit for Andy's glasses, and first-aid supplies for their bumps, bruises, and scrapes.

They were still at the diner half of the drugstore when the mechanic walked in and found them. "Rough news, boys," he said. "Ol' Bessie can't get back on her wheels without special-order parts. I went ahead and ordered 'em, but it'll be at least two days before I can expect 'em in. Christmas rush and all."

Patrick and Joe both groaned, but Pete spoke up. "Guess we're staying in town for a few days, then. Is there a motel around here?"

"Well, there's half the Motor-Inn just outside of town..."

" _Half_ the Motor Inn?" Joe asked.

Their waitress scooted by. Pete noticed her nametag read 'Lavinia' and she wore a little beta symbol around her neck. "The other half got blown up because two dumbasses were cooking meth in room eight. Stay across the street at the hotel. The rooms are small and the third floor you have to share a bathroom because it's almost two hundred years old and there are at least three ghosts that haunt the place, but nobody's running a makeshift meth lab there, either."

Patrick's eyes had grown steadily wider and more dazed. "Meth...lab?"

Pete patted him on the shoulder. "The hotel sounds great. Let's get a room, guys."

The waitress smirked. "Just...stick to the third floor, bright-eyes."  
**

Lavinia the waitress's cryptic advice soon became clear when Pete checked them into the hotel. The owners were playing up the historic landmark angle, which meant that every available corner had been stuffed with knick-knacks dating from before the Civil War, and every wall bore a painting of all the famous Presidents who'd purportedly slept there. 

The place was loaded with Christmas decorations, buntings, lights, garlands made out of dried fruit and strings of nuts (which Pete and Joe both fondled with barely-suppressed snickers), and balls of mistletoe (which Patrick and Andy studiously avoided standing under while Pete signed the register and counted out bills from their envelope of carefully-hoarded cash).

The clerk slid two forms towards Pete and Joe. "If you boys would just fill out your profiles, we'll get you into orientation. Alphas, your seminar is starting in fifteen minutes--"

Pete stared down at the paper in front of him. _A questionnaire?_ With questions like "If you were an ice cream, what flavor would you be?"

Andy cleared his throat. "We just need rooms. Not dates."

"My dance card's all full," Joe said.

Pete frowned and shoved the paper back towards the clerk. "The hell is this?"

The young man's mouth formed an O. "Ohhh! You're not here for Concordance purposes?"

"No we are not," Patrick said firmly. "We're here for sleeping-in-a-hotel purposes. Is that a problem?" He stared up at the clerk.

The clerk backed down and Pete's cheeks grew warm. Watching Patrick go alpha was hot as fuck when he was close to his heat. Not quite as fun when Patrick fought him on lyrics or called his ass out when he'd not been practicing, but right now? Watching Patrick's hat brim almost bonk the guy right in the nose? Hot as fuck.

"I--oh--I--ah--right away, sir. I'll just--get you--something on the third floor?"

Patrick pulled his lips back into something that was supposed to be a smile but had more _fuck you_ and teeth than it should have. "Yes, I think that would be best."

The clerk turned away and rummaged in the antique secretary that dominated the wall behind him. Pete had never seen real pigeonholes before, but this definitely looked like a pigeonholed place. He turned back around with two keys. "You'll h-have to take two rooms, they're way too small to sleep four." Patrick just stared at him. The clerk stammered. "I...can give you connecting rooms that share a bathroom...thirty percent off the full rate...since you're last-minute..."

"Thank you." Patrick's voice was low and deadly and it gave Pete shivers. The clerk stammered through an apologetic explanation that there were no working elevators because of the historic restoration still going on. They could go up the main staircase to the gallery level and take the south stairwell to the third floor. 

"If you're coming down, though, remember the south stairwell will take you all the way down. The third floor north stairwell only goes down to floor two and the outside balcony. There's a lovely view of the river from there," the clerk added as he pushed keys towards them. He licked his lips and looked at Patrick again. "And if you do need the company of an omega, um..."

Pete turned away from the tiny little Nativity made of birch bark sticks displayed on the mantel (complete with a baby Jesus in a walnut shell) and stepped up right next to Patrick with his lip curled up. He eyed the clerk, who wore a sweater vest (Patrick wore sweater vests--they were less, yet somehow more, than a whole sweater when Patrick wore them). His hair was neatly combed to the side without needing straighteners or hours of effort. His hands were clean and his nails were trimmed (and not colored with Sharpie) and Pete bet he would never give Patrick as much trouble as Pete did about heats and ruts.

That didn't mean Pete was about to stop giving out trouble. "Is there a problem here?"

The clerk's brows drew together and he stared at Pete, tilting his head and not being very subtle about sniffing the air.

"The rooms are fine," Patrick said, more gently. "You should find someone you like to spend time with. Not just someone who smells good."

They wound their way up the stairs, Patrick huffing and puffing and Joe complaining every third step until they got to their rooms on the third floor and saw that the clerk wasn't kidding. 

They stopped by Andy and Joe's room first. The room was done up in wallpaper with ladies in giant hoop skirts and dancing animals playing flutes. There were a lot of ruffles on things like curtains and lampshades. The dresser was this small thing with lion heads carved into the curlicues on its side, but the bed was humongous and took up most of the room. Four monster-sized posts at the corners held up a velvet canopy in a rich green with gold fringe. 

"Good lord," Joe said, shaking the velvet, which sent Patrick into an immediate sneezing fit. Joe immediately started taking pictures to email to Marie. "This is a bed to found dynasties in."

"I think I found a step stool to get up into it," Andy said, rising from his crouch. "Also I think there's a chamber pot under there. You're supposed to pee in those if you wake up in the middle of the night."

Pete dropped down next to Andy. "We really are a poor band. We don't have a pot to piss in."

Patrick finally stopped sneezing and hauled Pete up. "No, we live in the twenty-first century and we use Gatorade bottles like civilized people."

In their own room, the bed was equally intimidating. Pete had to take a running jump to get up on top of the mound of tasseled pillows piled in the center. Patrick arched an eyebrow. "Are we supposed to fuck on this thing or do I have to wrestle you for King of the Mountain?"

Pete grinned. "Why not both? Both is good." He held a hand down for Patrick to clamber up next to him. The canopy was pale blue, thankfully not velvet, and had silvery gray fringe. The wallpaper was full of men in tri-cornered hats playing fifes and marching with poorly-secured snare drums and muskets and flags.

Once his boyfriend was properly perched atop the mound of pillows and extras, Pete pinned him and straddled his hips. "Hi," he said.

Patrick smirked up at him. "Hi yourself." He shifted and Pete felt...interest. "Were you jealous of that omega downstairs at the desk?" 

Pete scowled, only taking Patrick half-seriously. "No. Yes. Maybe. You went full alpha on him." Pete spread his knees, dropping his body onto Patrick's so the younger man went, "oof!"

Pete peered down to where their noses touched. "You never go full alpha on me."

Patrick raised his eyebrows. "Last time someone tried to pull alpha-hole shit on you, you jumped off an amp and planted both feet into the guy's chest. And we've been forever banned from the town of Gnaw Bone, Indiana because of it."

Pete moved down closer, so their lips were brushing and it looked to his vision like Patrick only had one eye. Or three. "It's okay when it's you, though."

Cyclops-Patrick suddenly wrapped both arms around Pete and flipped them.

Pete sank into the pile of pillows and feather ticking and flailed. He couldn't help it, but the feel of sinking and something on top of him pressing down made his body do things like kick and push.

Patrick flopped to the side. "See?" He turned on his side to face Pete. "It's not okay. And that's okay, right?" He took Pete's hand in his own and laced their fingers together. "Now let's not waste this bed."

True to its form, the hotel's historic-landmark-ness kept it from having TVs in every room, but Pete was entertained plenty when Patrick pushed up his shirt and licked down his chest, past his belly button, and worked his jeans and boxers off. 

In a few days, Pete wouldn't have the option of slowing down to return the favor of slipping his hands between Patrick's thighs and cupping the swell there, so he took advantage now, tripping his fingers over pale, ginger-dusted flesh, inhaling the musk that was Patrick, listening to the sounds he made and generally taking no rush to get anywhere but further into the pile of pillows and quilt and bedsheets (and okay, some dust, too).

And after he licked every part of Patrick he wanted to taste and swallowed the rest, he checked his best friend for bruises and kissed the cut in his hairline. And if he held a little too tightly as they drifted off to sleep, it was just because they talked about ghosts right before turning off the light.  
**

Patrick was haunted that night, but not by ghosts. He slipped in and out of sleep, teetering on the edge of a deep hole made of pillows and feather ticking that smelled like French-milled soaps and old-lady vultures who baked cookies and kept hovering their wings over the plates. _"Mine! Mine!" they cawed._

_Patrick looked down and the cookies were shaped like Petes. "But he's--"_

_He reached for the Pete-cookie and the vulture-lady batted him away. "No! You can't have if you can't catch!" And the Pete-cookies suddenly had wings. And really long trumpets that sort of looked like dicks to Patrick but the important thing was that they were flying away, up and off the trays while the vulture-ladies cackled and flapped musty-smelling wings and someone was playing piccolo in the background that sounded like screeching metal--_

_\--And he was back in the van, one side freezing and the other melting hot, leaning into a lunge at Pete, screeching metal, the sickening swoop of weightlessness and the harsh jolt of stars behind his eyelids, and Pete's voice murmuring sleepy "Patrickpatrickpaaatrick don't--"_

_Don't leave--_

He jolted awake the third time to find Pete sitting up, his pen scratching in the beat-up notebook he carried around with him. He was dressed and cleaned up.

"Did I wake you?" Patrick's voice sounded froggy to his own ears.

"It's after ten," Pete said. "This town smells great. The bakery is going full-speed today. I've already seen the Cookiemobile twice. Maybe if I asked nicely, they'd let me drive it."

Patrick squinted. He didn't think he'd dropped into Willy Wonka's factory overnight, but Pete's true identity as an Oompa-Loompa didn't really seem that far-fetched. "I don't think letting you drive anything named 'The Cookiemobile' will end well for anyone."

"Fine. You can drive. I'd rather be the hood ornament anyway." Pete struck a dramatic pose. "Come on. Pancakes are the special next door and Lavinia's working again. She asked after you, by the way."

Patrick fumbled for his glasses. "How long have you been up? Please tell me you got some sleep last night. I thought I put you out pretty good."

Pete rolled off the bed. "I'm fine. But after that third kick to the kidneys, I threw in the towel. Andy and Joe were up early, too. They swear their room was haunted and thought ours was, too, until I told them it was just you."

Patrick sat up and rubbed his eyes, then found his jeans and shook them out. The hole in the edge of the pocket had grown bigger and he frowned at it. "I didn't think we were that loud."

"When I set out to make you moan, you'll shake down the walls." Pete tossed his hoodie at Patrick's head. "But you kinda put up a racket when you fell asleep."

"Oh." Patrick ducked his head. "Sorry." 

After he'd gotten dressed and slightly-less groggy, the four of them made their way down to the hotel lobby. Patrick had his guitar case because he wasn't leaving it in the room for ghosts to steal (they were welcome to his underwear, though). On the gallery level, the clerk from the night before was standing on a ladder and waved to Patrick. "Did the ghost bother you last night?"

Pete answered for him while Patrick squinted to read the sign the clerk was hanging. "That wasn't the ghost moaning, buddy."

Joe snorted and Patrick finally made out the letters on the sign. "Merry Scent-Mates?"

The woman holding the other side of the sign spoke. "You can sign up at the desk. Why spend the holidays with whoever's available when you can meet your perfect scent-mate."

Joe groaned. "Not this again. Come on, Patrick. Pancakes." 

Joe and Pete both pulled Patrick away while he protested. "But I have--opinions!"

"And I have pancakes in my future," Joe said sternly, hiking up his grip on Patrick's upper arm until only Patrick's toes brushed the ground.

"Okay, okay, okay!" Patrick threw himself into Pete, who hit the heavy wooden banister of the main staircase. When Patrick's shoes touched down, he shook himself like a dog. "I'll behave." But he looked back once more at the sign.

The clerk gave him a little finger-wave.

**  
The four of them burst out onto the street and Patrick realized Pete had been right. The whole town smelled like baked goods and it was amazing. Even though it had snowed a little bit overnight and the sky was still overcast and a fitful wind snaked between the buildings and ruffled the artificial greenery tied around the light poles.

The "Butt Drugs" sign was lit up and the diner sign in the window flashed an "Open" and Patrick was suddenly hungry enough to step off the curb with pancakes on his mind.

So it was a shock to his system to hear Pete yelling, "Patrick, no!" and a horn blaring and to see a giant Christmas tree iced cookie with wheels and a horn and red and green headlights flashing in his eyes and a young woman peering out from the middle of it and waving her red-mittened hands frantically.

Patrick saw his death imminent. He hoped his mom would adjust enough details of the way in which he died to avoid eternal humiliation and to avoid him showing up on Yahoo News of the Weird.

But Pete had somehow developed octopus powers and Patrick stumbled back into Pete's two-arms-and-at-least-one-leg grip. Patrick watched in shock as the giant cookie rolled past and realized he'd almost met his maker courtesy of a fucking golf cart.

Okay, so it was a tricked-out golf cart, with chocolate-chip cookie hubcaps and wheels that looked like they were more suited for off-roading than sand traps along the back nine. And okay, so he might have melted into Pete's arms a little bit while the rest of him panicked at the close call. 

"Got you!" Pete crowed, pausing to bite his ear. "No need to thank me because you're buying my pancakes."

They crossed the street (safely this time, without inviting the wrath of the predatory cookiemobile) and entered the drugstore once more. Patrick already recognized a handful of people who clearly came with the property and gave a lame little hand-wave to Lavinia.

Pete shoved Patrick into the booth and scooted in after him. "Me pancakes, you buying."

"Okay, Captain Caveman." Patrick rolled his eyes but Pete's smile went all the way up into his eyes.

Pete leaned in. "In a few days, you could find out just how much of a caveman I could be."

Patrick's mouth went dry. Ever since the first heat when he built Pete a nest, sang him a love song, and fucked him silly, their whole world had been waiting for a claiming. A claiming that didn't feel right to Patrick. Not because he wasn't head over heels and balls to the wall into Pete, but because there were so many expectations.

And Pete wasn't exactly shy about not wanting a conventional approach, either. He still spent some of his heats by himself. Those times, Patrick had said goodbye to Pete and left him with water and cheese and crackers and power bars and Gatorade. 

Then Patrick crept back a few hours later and stood guard in the alley outside the practice space, catching whiffs of Pete's intoxicating heat-scent and trying to transcribe it into chord progressions and melodies that didn't sound like sex on six strings (it was hard not to make Pete in heat sound like every sultry torch song ever. A lot of those melodies would live on his computer or in musical notebooks and never see the light of day).

"We'll see how you feel in a few days," Patrick said, as Lavinia brought them their pancakes. "If-if you want me."

Joe checked his phone. "So good news everybody--Marie says the recording studio called her and they're pushing back our time two days. Some other band agreed to swap time with us."

"Why did they call Marie and not me?" Pete asked.

Patrick worried at his lower lip and hoped the answer didn't have to do with "omega."

Joe glanced down at his phone. "Oh. Her phone was the emergency contact not traveling with us."

Patrick sighed with relief. It was nice to have one damn thing not related to secondary orientation dynamics for once. "So that gives us tomorrow and the day after to get the van fixed and back on the road."

"With any luck, we'll even make it home for Christmas," Andy said. "And the first night of Hanukkah so your mom doesn't tie me in the garage for not getting you home for the holidays."

"My mom would _never_ tie you in the garage. She'd tie _me_ in the garage." Joe finished the last bite of his pancakes and went after Patrick's. Patrick dueled him with his fork.

Andy was on the verge of growling at them to behave when the door to the outside came open, jangling with the strip of jingle bells strapped to the bar. A cheer went up from the assembled patrons as two teenage girls and one tall woman with dark red hair streaked with white came into the diner, arms laden with bakery boxes.

"Hey everybody, Aunt Portia's here!" One of the kids with the middle-aged woman near the front yelled. A round of applause went through the diner. All except for the very back four tables, where the waitress had been when the boys first entered. One of the men there, missing a sport coat but wearing dress pants, a button-down shirt, and a tie with an obvious stain, stood and moved forward. The alpha-scent that preceded him was so obvious that Patrick knew he was wearing scent-enhancer. That shit was supposed to be illegal.

Beside him, Pete bristled. If he'd been a cat, his entire coat would have floofed out to make him look twice as big and his tail would have bristled like a bottle-brush.

"Portia! You're as intoxicating as your bakery and twice as lovely." the man said, his voice sounding artificially hearty. "Let me give you a hand with those."

The woman sidestepped neatly and sent a cool glare towards the man. "And you're as intoxicated as I'd expect shortly before lunch on a Tuesday, Devon. I don't recall asking for help."

He moved back into her path. "Nonsense! And it's _Mayor_ Devon now."

"Aw crap, not this again," Lavinia the waitress muttered under her breath. "'Scuse me," she said to the boys and turned away from the table. "Mayor Devon, your eggs are getting cold." She stepped between the mayor and the redhead with the silver streaks in her hair and the thunderhead gathering in her expression.

From the back, the men gathered there--Patrick recognized them as those dudes that every small town seemed to have. They loitered outside the convenience store where everybody got their lottery tickets and emergency milk and let you know what they thought of you, your hair, and Kids Today(TM). They argued their political opinions loudly, and made sure you knew they weren't afraid to throw around rude words because they were too somethingorother for "PC culture." 

And Pete loved to start shit with them, provided he had an easy escape route. Patrick clamped his hand down over Pete's thigh, which had started to move in fidgety anticipation.

Meanwhile, the cook--a young guy with olive skin and jet black hair secured behind a white cap and tattoos on his neck--had come out from the swinging door behind the lunch counter. "Aunt Portia, thank you for bringing these by. Ladies, over here. I have the display set up already." 

Mayor Devon wasn't about to let Cook diffuse a situation, though. Patrick glanced toward Andy when the man put his hands on the waitress's upper arms and firmly moved her to the side. "Portia--"

Pete squirmed out of Patrick's grip. I should have never let him sit on the outside of the booth.

Portia, for her part, kept an iron grip on the stack of bakery boxes in her arms. "I said no, Devon. I don't care what experts you drag out of the radio station's lonely hearts hour or what nonsense you spout from that Concordance club y'all are having back there, we are done. Through. Never, ever, ever getting back together."

The younger girls with her had scooted over to the lunch counter and the cook was helping them unload bakery boxes from their arms. Lavinia scowled and glanced back towards the pharmacy counter in the back. Meanwhile Patrick made a grab for Pete, who slithered out of his grip like the eel he was and dove for Patrick's guitar case, propped against the side of the booth. "Hey!" He raised his voice and addressed the late breakfast diners. "Who wants to listen to something better than an argument?"

He dragged Patrick's acoustic out of the case, twanging the strings as he went. "We are a band called Fall Out Boy, from Chicago, Illinois, and we're stuck here while our van gets fixed, but that means you're in luck because my main man, Patrick Stump, has the sweetest voice you ever heard outside of an angel with a Christmas tree shoved up its butt and he's going to sing to you right fuuu--" Patrick's eyes widened, conscious of the lady with the kids over in the window seat. "--freaking--now!" Pete recovered just in time, preventing Patrick from having to jump-tackle him on principle.

Patrick didn't have the chance to warm up and he really could have come up with about seven hundred better distractions, including "four tired boys from Chicago get the hell out of the diner before the domestic dispute gets ugly" but that just wasn't a Pete thing. But Patrick had been practicing several Christmas carols and could even play the Dreidel song and even learned the Hanukkah song just to torment Joe with Adam Sandler impersonations.

But when he started strumming and Andy started thumping his palms on the table to keep time, he got his revenge on Pete the only way he knew how. "Ohhhhh...Grandma got run over by a reindeer!"  
**

Patrick singing had started out as a passive-aggressive counter-measure to Pete deciding to disrupt these people's lives by inserting himself into somebody else's business, but after he finished singing about Grandma's untimely yuletide demise, his voice was warm and the patrons clapped, many with relieved looks on their faces. 

He started a slower song next--one he'd been practicing to play for his older brother as a joke--"I'll have a Blue Christmas without you..." He even warbled a passingly good imitation of Elvis, then got into the spirit of things with "Run Run Rudolph." And then, because the people were clapping along and more people had come into the diner from the street once they heard the music and Mayor Devon and Aunt Portia had stopped fighting because Pete, that fucker, did know a thing or two about controlling a crowd, Patrick started a song he'd been practicing to play for Pete.

"What's this? What's this? There's color everywhere? What's this? There's white things in the air!" And if Pete's eyes widened and his jaw dropped when he heard Patrick croon out his favorite song from one of his favorite movies of all time, and if he stared over at Patrick from the lunch counter with his mouth soft and his eyes bright, well, maybe those Omega Network movie-moments might really happen once in a great while.

**  
Patrick's mini-concert was such a diversion that Lavinia comped them their breakfast. "Listen, you do not understand how nice it was not to have to listen to those two. Aunt Portia and Mayor Devon have had it in for each other for _eight hundred and fifty seven years_." She ran a hand through the frazzled parts of her brown-gold hair and lowered her voice. "They're the oldest people in town to have the secondary traits. Back when things were still pretty crazy, these scientists came to town and started the compatibility testing."

Joe grimaced. "Let me guess--scent-mates?"

Lavinia nudged Andy with her hip and scooted into the booth next to him. "Not that sophisticated." She snapped her gum. "My mom told me they asked the high school students back then for volunteers to take experimental hormonal tests--supposedly to be used for suppressants. They thought if they could get the right mix, they'd just start adding it into the water and everything could go back to normal for them."

Andy shook his head. "They've never found anything that works on everybody. And nothing without side-effects."

Lavinia's frosty pink lips twisted. "Not for lack of trying. At least not in this town. At any rate, from what my mom says, they found certain scent-markers that started compatibility testing. Aunt Portia and Mayor Devon were the best match the pharmaceutical company found. Super-compatible by all the markers--they were even dating in high school. Prom king and Homecoming queen." Lavinia pursed her lips. "Of course, they never bothered to ask anybody who actually knew them." 

"I know the feeling," Patrick muttered fervently.

She shot Mayor Devon's group of grumpy old men a look. "My mom says Devon wasn't so bad back then, but then when those scientists started talking about alpha traits and the 'natural order of things' he started turning into his old man--and Aunt Portia was a feminist, so she wasn't having none of it." Lavinia shifted. "Long story short, they broke up so hard at their senior prom that fifty years later, people still get twitchy around parade floats around here."

Joe's eyebrows went up. "Uhh, do I need to ask why?"

Lavinia grinned. "When Aunt Portia breaks up with you, she does it with matches. My mom has a whole scrapbook of it. Mayor Devon's folks got him a mustang convertible that year and the prom committee covered the thing in tissue paper roses to drive in the parade. When he tried to 'claim' Aunt Portia, she lit an entire book of matches and dropped it in the decorations. Thing went up like a fireball." She laughed. "You should see the pictures."

Patrick didn't need to look at Pete to feel his grin. "What happened next?" Pete asked.

Lavinia shrugged. "Mom says Portia ran off to the woods that night in her prom dress and didn't come back for five whole days. And of the other omegas at the school, about half went with her. Town legend says they took over the boy scout camp and had a huge pagan bonfire and turned into wolves, but my mom says they mostly just drank and smoked and listened to a lot of Heart and the Runaways and chased off anybody who wasn't an omega. And that's why we have the Omega Sanctuary out at the old Boy Scout campground." She cast another worried glance back where Mayor Devon sat. "At least, for now." She motioned to the four of them. "You all did the town a huge favor in avoiding another blow-up. I like working here enough to not want Portia to burn the place to the ground."


	3. He stands alone because he's high on himself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a hallmark of Hallmark movies that the strangers who come to these small towns inevitably get dragged into the town's drama, and our boys are no different. What will they learn about themselves? Will Joe really go home with a present for Marie that says, "I like your butt?" (see the end notes for the answer, but you know what it is already, don't you?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wanted to keep this one to three chapters, but the breaks fall where they fall.

It turned out that Lavinia wasn't the only one grateful to Patrick for distracting Portia and Devon. When the four of them left the diner to go peek in the windows of the rest of the shops in town (Joe bought a bag for Marie that said, "I believe in you. You can do it. Your butt looks great." Patrick wasn't sure that was a wise choice but Pete pulled him back and said, "Sometimes, they have to learn their own lessons.") 

Patrick snorted and buried his face in Pete's neck to hide it while Andy pretended to be so deeply absorbed by a coffee mug shaped like a piglet that Joe completed the transaction without his ostensible awareness, thereby allowing Andy to claim ignorance of Joe's poor decision-making skills.

As he breathed in, the taste of Pete settled on the back of his tongue and started a smolder under his ribcage. It was just a hint--a spark, a weak flame that could be snuffed out if Pete's grip on the back of Patrick's hoodie turned stiff--but it was there, ready to start a war Patrick had to keep hidden for his own sake as well as Pete's. The part of him that still really wished he could growl and claim scrabbled like a kitten in a shoebox while the rest of him just held out longing hands towards the tiny warmth and hoped that when heat-time came around, he would be the one chosen.

"What do you guys think?"

They were interrupted (saved) from having to confirm or deny Joe's impending ass-whupping by the presence of a young teenage girl on a red scooter. "Hey, you're the guy who sang at Butt's, right?"

"Yes, he sings about butts a lot," Joe said. "But in his defense, Pete's the one who writes the lyrics." Andy slapped him in the chest.

The girl smirked. "I'm from Aunt Portia's. She wants to see you in the bakery."

The four of them shared a look. "Uhh," Andy said, "Is this some sort of...royal summons?"

"Yeah," Joe said. "Is there a penalty for being late?"

She squinted up at him, brown braids poking out from under her bobble hat. "Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup." Then turned her bike and pedaled away.

Patrick shared a look with Andy, who jerked his head. "Fruit cup, man. I'd haul."

"Fruit cup," Joe echoed. "Also this is the woman whose cookies wowed the Mayor of Flavortown. This is not someone I would like to cross."

"I've got to meet this woman," Pete said.

Of one mind, they double-timed it up the long main-street drag until they came to the brick and ironworks wall surrounding the bakery building. It even had a tall brick smokestack in the middle of the warehouse section of the building with a giant Christmas candle sketched out in one of those light grids. The wall ended at a storefront portion of the building, sticking out like the proboscis of a giant brick insect (only smelling much better and made out of bricks and windows and a wooden door with gold lettering on the front proclaiming it "Aunt Portia's Kitchen Door"). Pete smirked and pointed at the sign. "At least it didn't say 'Aunt Portia's Back Door' because between that and Butt Drugs, I might want to move here."

Patrick tugged his cap further down over his eyes. "Please don't talk." He pushed the door open and a little bell rang above his head. The scent of baking cookies hit him like a ton of bricks. A ton of bricks he'd gladly eat his way through.

**  
If Patrick stopped and sniffed the air like a deer in a meadow, Pete was a full-on cartoon character. The baked-goods scent had him floating within moments. "Oh my God," he said. "I live here now."

"Careful," came a voice from behind the display case, decked out with confections and cakes that belonged on TV shows and at celebrity weddings. "Say that too loud and I'll put you to work." Aunt Portia herself emerged from the door leading to the back. "Hello, boys," she said, tucking her silvered auburn hair back under her cap. "I have you to thank for the assist at the diner this morning." 

She picked up a tray from behind the display case. "Why don't you all have a seat."

Patrick was the first one down, followed quickly by Joe, then Andy. Pete dithered for a second or two because there was something about Aunt Portia that piqued his curiosity.

"Now then." Aunt Portia's tray contained a teapot, cups and saucers, a monster-sized plate of cookies, and four parfait cups filled with shortbread topped with rainbow layers of fruit. 

"This is...very kind of you, ma'am," Andy said. 

"Least I could do after that nonsense at the restaurant," she said. The scent of some truly amazing butter cookies filled Pete's nostrils. "Ever since Devon and his crew took office on the town council it's been nonsense after nonsense. My Priscilla doesn't even go near that end of town anymore."

"What happened?" Joe was already digging into the cookie plate, coming up with something with raspberry filling that squelched between his teeth and elicited a moan from him that was almost pornographic.

Patrick stole an almond cookie out from under Joe's fingers. When Joe growled, Patrick growled back. Since neither of them had a growl, it was like hearing kittens arguing.

Aunt Portia's lips tightened into a thin line. "Better Dwellings is what happened. They came in with this big plan to remodel the Hotel Butterworth--preserve the historic nature of the building, they said, while maintaining traditional values in the management." She folded her arms across her chest and scowled. "They turned the first two floors into an alpha hostel. Claimed it was because the omegas had the sanctuary that alphas should have a place to call their own, too."

"Well that's not entirely unfair to say it," Joe said mildly. "At least an alpha hostel would keep the little buggers in town while omegas can roam free outside of it." 

"Ordinarily, I'd say that was fair," Aunt Portia said. "But the Omega Sanctuary was funded by the County Parks and Recreation budget. Which comes from the same pool of money that pays for Historic Landmark upkeep like the Civil War cannon in the park. The Better Dwellings people made the case that the hotel is an historic landmark, so the remodel should partially come out of the Parks and Rec budget." Aunt Portia pursed her lips. "It ain't a huge budget to begin with. The hotel could self-fund, but Devon worked a deal with them. Now the Omega Sanctuary's only got half the money it normally gets for upkeep and operations...but we still have the same amount of omegas who need a place." She frowned. "As usual, alphas helping themselves to whatever they want without a care for other people."

Patrick hunched into his jacket a little further.  
**

Aunt Portia let them gorge themselves on cookies and fruit cups before getting to her real point. It was somehow both a surprise and not to Pete, who'd been waiting for something like this. 

"You boys aren't as unknown as you think you are. What you did in Chicago on Valentine's Day? Well, word got around. They're calling it the Valentine's Day Smackdown in some circles." 

"Which circles?" Andy asked. "Not that we're not proud of inciting a riot at a punk show-slash-speed dating event, but--" 

"We're four guys and two of us are still underage and none of us have money, while Concordance is huge and has lawyers." Joe sprayed cookie crumbs as he talked. 

"Plus, the riot was mostly me." Pete pointed at himself. 

"It was mostly Concordance," Patrick corrected him firmly. 

Pete shrugged. "I'm riot-worthy." 

"I've known you for five minutes and I can tell that about you." Aunt Portia smiled at Pete and patted Patrick's hand. "He must be a handful." 

Patrick didn't meet her eyes. Pete shifted closer. "Ma'am, nobody can hold Pete unless he wants to be held." 

"Hold me tight, Tricky," Pete retorted. "Or don't." Because Patrick never would just hold him down. 

"It was brave what you did, standing up to Concordance like you did."

"We hear you did your own standing up to them," Joe said. "My girlfriend would love to talk to you sometime about it." 

"What Joe is leaving out is that our girlfriend is the one who figured out Concordance's plan," Andy said. 

"I stood up to a stupid notion by a fringe group. You boys stood up to a juggernaut. That's what we're trying to do with the Omega sanctuary. Anybody doesn't have a safe place to spend a heat--or a safe person to spend it with--should have a place to go."

Patrick lifted his head." Yes, " he said, his voice strong. "A safe place where everybody will leave them alone." 

Now it was Pete's turn to hunch into himself. "Hold me tight or don't," he muttered. Patrick tried so hard, and Pete didn't know how to tell him that he didn't have to try, he just had to _be_. He just had to trust his instincts. Not about being an alpha, but about having a Pete. 

"I invited you boys here to see how you felt about taking a tour of the setup we have here."

"Are you kidding?" Joe said, "If I could take pictures, that'd be a better gift for Marie than an 'I like your butt' bag!" 

"Almost anything would be better than an 'I like your butt' bag," Patrick muttered. 

**   
Aunt Portia was called "aunt" for a reason. She had an entire army of nieces, nephews, and other assorted minions to do her bidding. One of them, a boy with brown floppy hair named Royce, directed them into a pickup truck and drove them out to the omega sanctuary. 

On the way out, Patrick teased out of the kid that he was interested in music and liked to take metal songs and turn them into folk ballads. Royce pulled into the wooded dirt road marked by a pine-log arch with the Omega symbol carved into it. 

"So, uh, The Sanctuary is for any omega who wants a safe space for a heat. Basically, you reserve a cabin and collect the key from the main lodge here. They provide snacks, towels, linens, and safety. No alphas are allowed on site without an escort." He said the last with a sheepish glance in Patrick's direction. 

Patrick shrugged." It makes sense."

"I've had alphas out here a few times," Royce said. "It helps because I don't want them thinking I'm looking to be claimed. I'd rather headbang out here in the woods where nobody else gets bothered about it."

Royce showed them to the main lodge and cabin one. Joe snapped pictures like mad on his phone, muttering," This is great, " and" Marie is gonna want to come here herself. We're going to have to book a vacation as soon as we can afford one."

But while Patrick and Joe got Royce to admit that Iron Maiden could be pretty melodic on their own, Patrick was watching Pete. 

Pete wandered around the cabin, noting the canopied bed that reminded him of the hotel. Only the cabin was more rustic and cozy and less fussy." Patrick, this'd be a really rad place for a heat. No alphas lurking." 

Patrick looked at the ground. Did Pete know how he lurked sometimes outside the squat/rehearsal space, hoping to be let in? 

The main lodge was larger than the cabins. "If you're feeling social, you can come here and if anyone else is hanging out, you can hang with them without fear of being harassed. And if you want to entertain an alpha without committing them to your heat, you can use the lodge to hang out. Any time someone makes a reservation, there's security present. You don't have to interact, but they're there in case someone can't take no for an answer, " Royce said. 

Patrick hunched in further. Andy edged up to him. "Hey, this place would also be a killer place to play a show, too."

"Yeah." Patrick watched how Pete took in the edge of the woods, the wild tangle of trees ringing the clearing, the winding paths leading away, and the low isolation of the cabins. He knew what Pete was thinking--a cabin away from everybody, where he could be as alone and unbothered as he deserved to be. 

On the way back, Pete's enthusiasm for the setup was only matched by Joe. Patrick sank further down into his jacket. _I'm not enough_ , he realized. _He doesn't need me_. 

In spite of the brightness of the wintry day, the cold seeped into his bones.

  
**

  
The Sanctuary visit was exactly what Pete needed to set himself back to rights. The mood was spoiled, however, when Patrick wouldn't respond to any of his jokes--even the ones that made creative use of the word "suck." 

The afternoon crowd at the diner was big enough that the four of them had to squeeze in at the counter and Lavinia was too busy to do more than wave. But Pete could smell the growing population of alphas congregating, and Mayor Devon's clique seemed larger and louder to his ears. 

Joe wanted to shop for more for Marie, and Andy volunteered to go with him. "Patrick?" Pete asked. 

Patrick shook his head. "I just want to sleep." He wouldn't look at Pete. "Alone." 

"Oh. Okay." 

Pete found himself back at Aunt Portia's. 

"Pete? What are you doing here all alone?" Aunt Portia looked up from the flat packs of boxes she'd been assembling.

Pete shoved his hands in his pockets. "You're an omega," he said.

A few locks of hair had escaped the net holding her blonde-streaked bun in check. "So I am," she said evenly.

"But you're not like other omegas."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "And how are other omegas, young man? Should I whine and soak my sheets hoping for an alpha to come rescue me because of hormones? Or get out there and run with the moon in my hair and own the night?" She tilted her head to the side. "Why are you here?"

"Because I want to help," Pete said. "Because I spent a lot of heats out in woods, in dangerous places. I spent heats in people's sheds and state forests and none of those places were safe. This omega sanctuary is a good thing for--for weirdos like me."

"Aww, honey. You're not a weirdo." Portia's gaze softened. "I mean, you got that whole 'boy wearing make-up' thing and those pants have got to be cutting off the blood flow to--places, but you ain't weird because you won't be tamed, honey."

"Did you ever have an alpha?" Pete asked.

Portia's hands moved faster, stacking cookies between sheets of waxed paper. She shook her head. "I never wanted to settle down." She grinned. "Too many cute boys out there." 

"How did you stand it? Didn't everyone tell you how much you needed a guiding hand?" Pete accepted the broken cookie she waved in front of his face. 

Portia nodded. "The changewave was still new, so I got it from a 'wild girls need to settle down' angle." This grin was pure feral and Pete liked it. "It didn't take. You can't tame the wolf, no matter how much she looks like a puppy." 

Pete bit his lip. "What if there was someone you...maybe didn't mind once in awhile. Or maybe more often." 

The older woman's smile softened. "Amelia." She paused in the cookie-packing. "My dear friend. It was her idea to take over the old factory and turn it into a bakery. She's never put a collar on me. But she gave me a scent and let me do the rest." 

Pete sat in the chair next to her and took up a box. "Gave you a scent. I like that. Patrick--he's not a typical alpha, and I would--I'd be okay if it was him, but--" 

"Only okay," Portia finished for him. "Even if you love him, you can't abide anyone controlling you. And that's not what love is anyway. Scent-mates, control, submission and dominance--none of those things are the whole of a relationship. It's about you and him--who you are and who he is. Not what some busy body tells you." She grinned. "Even salty old broads who feed you cookies."

"I wish I could find a way to tell him that." 

"Well, don't you write songs? Write him a song." 

He started folding the bits out that made the holes for the advent doors, then slotted the plastic insert in between the lid and the back. "Heh. these shapes look like--" 

And that's when Pete Wentz remembered that he was a bastard genius.

Oh, it took some of that signature Pete Wentz charm, delivered with a full-throttle smile and the most bedroomy beseeching eyes he could muster, but in the end, nobody said no to Pete Wentz when he really really wanted something unless it was himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes. Joe does, in fact, go home with a present for Marie that says, "I like your butt." Come on--in what universe wouldn't he?


	4. And the sun burnt out tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Like all good Hallmark movies, several things happen at once. And holiday magic or some shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So if I haven't mentioned it before, this takes place after the Valentine's Day Shakedown and before the epilogue of the main Feral tale.

It took all of Portia's nieces and nephews to spread the word through the town. Pete texted Andy and Joe about his idea, and they texted right back that this was happening. 

By dinnertime, Pete had recruited roadies (Aunt Portia's nephews), ticket sales (Royce), and an actual permit to play (Portia's sister, Priscilla--the elder, not the younger who'd first found them this morning). 

As they hauled their gear out of the van (which currently had no front end), Pete turned phrases over in his mind. _Where is my boy...will he be a gentleman?_ He watched Patrick determinedly hauling amps into the back of Royce's truck while the floppy-haired Portia-progeny tucked tarps around the electronics. 

_You need him._

_Could I be him?_

But then Patrick passed behind him and paused, placing a hand on his shoulder. Patrick leaned in and breathed deep. "Only you could pull off something like this. You're amazing, Pete." 

Pete almost turned into an entire human puddle. _Take me_ , he thought. But he didn't say it out loud. Instead, he grinned. "I got something _you_ can pull on, Trickydoodle." 

Patrick just rolled his eyes and prodded his shoulder. "Yeah, yeah." 

**  
Patrick's headache had been ebbing and flowing all day. Even the nap didn't help. He thought being away from Pete might give him some space to remind himself that he and Pete had an arrangement. Patrick didn't have any right to demand more of him. He couldn't "take Pete in hand" the way everyone said Pete needed. 

The nap hadn't helped either. He slept fitful, dreaming about losing Pete in the woods, about lunging for Pete across the backseat of the van, only to have Pete back through the suddenly-open side door and vanish into the woods while Patrick went sickening-weightless and thudded back down with a jolt. He dreamed about holding Pete down like he was "supposed to" and Pete slipping through his fingers like smoke. _"Don't leave--"_

Loud thumping on the door woke him from his fitful twilight. Joe stood on the other side. "Rise and Shine, Prince Charming. We've got a gig."

Patrick blinked. "Whaa?" 

Andy filled him in as they crossed the street to the garage where their poor van lay in pieces. Patrick was both entirely shocked and not at all surprised to see that a gang of red-headed teenagers shuffling in through the chain-link fence, along with Royce's pickup truck. Pete was already bobbing around between them. They tracked his movements like a pack of velociraptors, lining up and moving as one as he danced in between them, never stopping for more than a moment or two. 

_How am I supposed to pin that down? How am I supposed to want to?_

Pete danced by him and shoved a handful of paper in his pocket. "I started something new," he muttered. 

Patrick glanced down and saw Pete's scrawl on the scraps of paper. Someone shoved a coil of amp cord onto his shoulder and he staggered. He only got to glance at the words but already they were settling into his brain, just like Pete's words always did. He hiked the cord up and brought it to a kid running line under Joe's direction. On the way back, he leaned into Pete and tried to tell him how amazing he was. Pete told him to pull his dick, but that...was Pete.

Pete was like a wave, carrying Patrick, Joe, and Andy--and the younger half of the town--from an idea to Patrick actually standing on a plywood platform with his guitar in front of him, singing, "Sat outside my front window. This story's going somewhere. He's well-hung and I am hanging onnnn--" 

Patrick didn't move as much as he usually did when they started the set. His headache still throbbed at the back of his head and they were two songs into it before he felt the adrenaline kick in. He kept his eyes closed half the time against the hardware-store lights that were their only illumination. 

Pete bounced over the makeshift stage and Joe, for once, nailed his guitar spins without nailing anyone else in the face (an occurrence more rare than any of them let on). Almost two hundred kids had gathered. Lavinia stamped their hands with omega symbols and charged them five bucks a head. 

Patrick tried not to sing to Pete while he sang Pretty in Punk but his eyes kept wandering towards his bassist. "I was terrified and would you mind if I sat next to you and watched you smile..." Patrick finished the last notes and pulled his hat down further, until the edge rubbed against the slice across the side of his head. 

"How you guys doing tonight?" Pete held up his hands and waited for the cheers. "Omegas need a place of their own," he said. "I saw the sanctuary in the woods and it's the best idea in the world, but we need you to make it happen. I don't care if you're alpha, beta, omega, or sick of having to pin a label on your orientation. Everyone gets scared and everyone deserves to feel safe when they're vulnerable." 

Pete's voice wobbled at the end of the sentence and Joe, bless his heart, stepped in. "You guys can make that happen. Aunt Portia made special cookies for us here tonight." A cheer went up from the crowd. "I know, right? Flavortown. _Flavor_. _Town_." 

Patrick cleared his throat. "Every dollar goes to the Omega Sanctuary. And if you're an omega who doesn't want to be tied down, you know where to go when you need--" He glanced over at Pete and something in his throat thickened. He swallowed it back down. "When you need to be free."

He started the opening to one of their newest songs. "Landing on a runway in Chicago, and I'm grounding all my dreams..."

**  
The itch under Pete's skin cooled when he plastered himself against Patrick's back and screamed about the sun burning out. But when Patrick raised a hand and started the crowd of kids singing along with "New friends are golden," even if Joe sort of rushed the guitar and Patrick missed half the harmonic chords, Pete just wanted to drown himself in the love.

So he fell backwards off the platform and into the waiting hands of two hundred kids who bore him up and wrapped him in the smells of sweat and gym socks and butter cookies with icing and hot chocolate and it was amazing until he got passed into a group of girls too small for even him and he sank below head level. "Whoa!"

The girls squealed. "Omigosh!" One gasped. An older girl than the young teens slid under him and kept him from hitting the ground flat on his back, but he still landed on one hip. It could have been worse if the ground was hard, but it was soft--and very very muddy. The girl's boyfriend made a clumsy grab and hauled him back up into the pit proper and over people's heads. One leg of his pants and his rear end were covered in mud, but that didn't matter to the kids caught up in the music and Pete felt the same.

"Thanks, bro! You're a lifesaver," he yelled--not that the guy could hear him. Towards the stage, he caught Patrick's worried expression. Look, sometimes that happened. You had all the support you needed until somebody fumbled but it was nobody's fault and there was always a helping hand to lift you back up. He lifted one thumb to show he was okay and Patrick jerked his head once.

The crowd passed him back towards the stage. Towards Patrick. He reached out to the alpha but it was Joe who pulled him back to his feet while Patrick made a feeble gesture in between chords. Back on stage, Patrick bumped his shoulder against Pete's. 

Pete realized that was one of the ways they checked in with each other, when Patrick thought Pete needed space. So many little things. Pete's fingers fumbled over the chords. Patrick dragged the mic stand over next to him and leaned his back against Pete's.

 _He gave you a scent, not a collar_. Pete remembered Aunt Portia's words. _It's about you and him. Who you are. Who he is_. He turned his head and met Patrick's lakewater eyes. 

Patrick was stubborn about understanding things sometimes. The space Pete needed was space from the world and its expectations. It was never the space between him and Patrick.

Pete could wait. 

**

Pete _couldn't_ wait. 

He knew better. He knew.

He fucking knew. 

He should have stuck around after the show. Gotten coffee instead of letting Patrick and Joe send him back to the hotel. "You've been running all day. The rest of us are fine to stow the gear," Andy said.

Patrick pulled him in close. "Go check for bruises and change your clothes. Your pants are still wet and you don't want to get sick."

"Plus, that mud smells kind of like barnyard, dude." Joe remained persistently pragmatic in his helpfulness.

So Pete made his way back to the hotel, his mind still spinning with the ideas falling into place around him, peeled off his dirty clothes and rinsed the worst of it off, then flopped face down and naked on the floor to just let his mind drift in the post-show haze. There was something he had to remember, but it would come to him. Just--he needed a second to let the cotton clear.

He woke up in a pool of sweat.

A text from Patrick waited on his phone. _So hungry. Gonna eat the furniture. At drugstore with Joe and Andy. Come over when you get this_.

He ducked into the shower and turned the lever all the way towards the snowflake. The pipes in the old hotel groaned in protest and his skin prickled with goose bumps. He let the shower run cold for as long as he could stand it. When he stepped out, shivering, teeth chattering, skin like cold meat under his pruny fingertips, the texture of the towel he used to dry off scraped over his skin and set every nerve ending on fire. _Not yet_ , he told himself. _Gotta get to Patrick_.

He pulled on layers and layers of clothes at first, to beat the chill, then stripped off two of them because _holy fuck hot!_ Finally, he just grabbed the old fashioned room key and left the room. That was his first mistake.

He wasn't halfway down the narrow stairs when it hit him. Alpha-stink. Oh, god, it was everywhere. In the hallway, probably all over the walls, and--ugh, now it was up his nose, too and the cold shower gave way to a smolder deep in his gut that came with a side helping of self-loathing.

As if summoned, a door opened at the end of the hall and a woman poked her head out. "There you are," she drawled. She had long wavy black hair and piercing gray eyes. "I thought I told them to send someone in business casual, but you'll do. Come on, I'm paying by the hour."

Pete froze. A very small part of him kind of wanted to find out why a woman that attractive wanted to pay for sex but the rest of him wanted very much to be anywhere else, and smelling like anything else because she was putting out pheromones that said, _come here, obey, submit, let me in_ and Pete did _not_ want to let anybody in. But his feet--his feet were already walking to her command.

Another door opened. "Thought I smelled--Oh, hey, dude, are you lost?" 

This man looked like a lumberjack. Right down to the plaid shirt and the luxuriantly groomed beard. _He is a lumbersexual if there ever was a word for it_. And Pete was just thinking about running off to live in the woods and pick pine needles out of his teeth.

Pete licked his lips. "Uh, no, I'm not--" He was dizzy though. 

"Hey," the woman snaps. "That's my order. Back off." Her command comes through and Pete's knees go a little weak as he stumbles. _Shit fuck shitfuck this is going to be a strong one_.

"You back off. I don't see him looking all that thrilled. Baby, you want a real alpha to make you shiver and take care of you? I got strong arms to hold you and a strong--"

"Hey! I said back off!" Her last command was laced with alpha growl and Pete shook out of the daze that threatened fuzz at the edges of his vision.

Alpha growl set his hackles up and his teeth on edge. "I'm not here for anybody. I just need to get downstairs to the lobby. Let me through."

The lumbersexual took his elbow. "I'll make sure you get there." But he was pulling Pete in the other direction. "Bright and early tomorrow morning. Unless you want to stay for breakfast."

Pete let out a snarl of his own. "I said let me through!" He shook off the alpha's grip and bolted headlong for the woman. 

She opened her arms. "Come to mama, baby."

Pete practically ran up the wall in a move that would have been amazing on stage with a bass, but was pure fear in a hotel hallway with a randy alpha making grabby hands. He skirted around her. "Not your baby, lady. That's fuckin' creepy!" he yelled and hit the door to the stairwell.

He took the stairs two at a time, leaping over the railing around the corners and reached the end. "Fuuck!" The door still said "2" which meant that he'd picked the wrong stairwell. And he was going to have to run through another entire floor of--he pulled the door open and found himself in one of Marie's nightmares.

This floor of the hotel had the rooms on one side, overlooking the gallery into the ballroom (thankfully deserted right now). But the hallway was lined with those stupid Concordance canopies. Pete flashed back to another hotel back when they played the show on Valentine's weekend. His head whirled with memories of the canopies in the back of the speed-dating venue were used to pair up alphas and omegas as scent-mates, stuffing hapless omegas into the covered booths so their scents could grow ripe and alphas could corner them. _Look how that shitshow turned out_. "It's fucking Christmas, not Valentine's Day! Come on!"

A young woman in a red skirt and a santa hat with a little Concordance logo on the brim stepped out of one of the far canopies. The taller woman that followed her caught her hand and pulled her close. "Gonna make you mine tonight, sweet thing. Moan for me?"

Pete almost--almost--vocalized an "awww" before shaking himself out. There was an alpha across the street with a purr just for him. Curtains rustled in the canopies and voices started to filter out. All he had to do was run the American Ninja gauntlet of alpha-holes to get to him.

A young man with a Concordance name tag stepped out of the nearest room. "Hi, welcome to the hostel! Let's get you into a canopy so you can find your perfect pheromone match!" He sniffed. "Fast, too, before you start a riot, my friend."

"Fuck off with your pheromones, asshole! I just want out of this place." Pete shoved him and started running. 

An alpha popped out of the canopy. "Omega?"

"Fucker!"

"Hey!" Another one came out of a room. "Language! You need to be taken in hand--"

Pete jumped over a stack of room service plates. "Eat a dick! Just not mine!"

Two hotel bellhops and a luggage cart emerged from between the canopies. "Hey man, no running! You'll meet your mate soon enough--"

Pete made a flying leap for the brass bars of the cart and swung like a spider monkey from the garment rack, through the luggage cart, and out the other side. "Sorry, no time for that shit!"

He passed the couple that had first come out of the canopies. "Mazel Tov and move, please!"

The two women squealed and ducked out of the way. The omega peered out over her new girlfriend's shoulder. "Hey, I think that's Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy!"

The stairway was dead ahead. "Not it!" Pete cried and dived for the fire door. Alphas! Fucking alphas!

He made it as far as the lobby before Patrick, Joe, and Andy came through the front door in a gust of cold air, take-out containers in their hands. Patrick's head immediately lifted. Even without the commotion of Pete sailing through the stairwell door at top speed, Patrick would have zeroed in on him, he knew it.

It centered him. _He gives me a scent, not a collar_.

"Pete, what the hell!" Joe cried out. It took him and Andy both to stop Pete's forward momentum. 

"Alphas. Everywhere. Place reeks!" Pete wheezed.

But Patrick has a comforting hand on his shoulder and the world slowed down for an instant. Patrick leaned in and breathed. "Pete?"

"Oh great. It's stupid-time," Joe muttered.

Andy hissed and nudged him. "Quit that. Let's just get Pete up to our room and you and I will turn our headphones up real loud and pretend we're somewhere else."

"There's no place like where Pete's not having heat, there's no place like where Pete's not having heat." Joe clicks his heels together.

Patrick scowled at him. "Dude, I will drop a house on you."

"We can't go upstairs," Pete pushed against Patrick, his instincts sending him far away from the reek of alpha ruts and that weird Concordance air-scrubber scent that made everything smell dead and fearful at the same time. "One of those canopy events again."

"Jesus," Patrick muttered. "I fucking hate those things."

"Two floors of rutty alphas in between us and our stuff," Joe said. "This sucks. Where are we supposed to go? Where's Pete supposed to go?"

The girl behind the reception desk stepped out. "Go to the omega sanctuary." 

"Hey," Joe said. "You were in the diner this morning."

She stepped out from behind the desk and leaned in to whisper. "Aunt Portia is my real aunt. You can take the Cookiemobile." She pressed a set of keys into Patrick's hand. "The key to the main lodge is on the ring. Right inside the door of the office are keys for all the cabins. Inside, they're stocked with towels and pads and other necessities." She glanced furtively back and forth before whispering. "I loved you guys!"

And that was how Patrick found himself driving a golf cart with a papier-mache Christmas tree cookie on top and wheel covers that looked like chocolate chip cookies down a state route in rural Ohio in the middle of the night, with snow blowing sideways in fat flakes, teeth chattering, with a trembling Pete tucked up beside him and Joe and Andy getting handsy in the back, singing at the top of his lungs a little ditty he'd been tossing around from the napkins and toilet paper squares Pete had shoved into his pocket earlier that night.

"Where is your boy tonight, I hope he is a gentleman. Maybe he won't find out what I know..."

"He's right next to you," Joe yelled from the backseat. "Drive faster, it's fucking cold!"

"We could get in an accident but I'm still driving--"

"That's not how it goes!" Pete burrowed further into Patrick.

Patrick pulled off the road and onto a dirt track past the sign with the omega symbol on it and descended into pitch-black darkness. The weak headlights of the golf cart were pretty pathetic, but they were enough to catch the eyeshine of more than one pair of eyes staring back at them. Eyes Patrick desperately hoped belonged to nice animals like deer and bunnies and not rabid predators like coyotes or mountain lions.

 _There's no mountains around here_ , he told himself. It didn't matter. Maybe they were prairie lions or something. Or--or bobcats. The trees pressed in on him, Pete pressed in on him, and he was really trying to be a good alpha, but all that was happening was he was running out of breath due to stress. Pete needed him, and all he could do was sing and purr.

The clearing came up suddenly, heralded by several sets of eyes bolting away. "Pete?" Patrick swung a left and pulled up in front of the porch of the largest cabin. Pete's hands burrowed deeper under Patrick's coat and he felt the heat from Pete's clammy palms over his bare stomach. Immediately followed by the freezing wind.

"Inside," Andy said. He leaped out of the backseat and bounded onto the porch. 

Patrick tossed him the keys. "Come on, Pete. We're here, we'll be someplace safe soon. Warm and comfortable, okay?" He shifted to get out of the golf cart. "Andy, find the key for cabin number--" he squinted at the sign pointing the way down the hill towards the next cabin, "--three."

Instead of getting out on his own side, Pete followed him out the driver's side of the golf cart--not that there were doors on the damn thing. But he was going too fast and barreled into Patrick and Patrick's feet slipped out from under him.

His arms windmilled and the ground rushed towards him and he landed, hard, Pete sprawled on top of him and stars burst into light behind his eyes.

His headache came roaring back, now with extra smell-o-vision in the form of Pete's pheromones screaming, "Chase me!" and Patrick's own hormones forgetting that his body wasn't made for chasing.

He pushed to his feet and Pete was actually screaming. Well, yelling. "Come on, Patrick!" Pete rolled off him. Something poked into the corner of his jeans, where the hole was. 

_Goddammit, not again!_ Patrick lunged up and Pete danced away. The weak red and green light from the Cookiemobile caught the white soles of his sneakers as he dashed off into the night. Patrick shook his head, trying to clear the fuzz, jammed his hat down further on his head, and set off after him.

He caught up with Pete on a wide trail full of mulch and mud puddles in between the snow still piled on the ground. Pete was trotting down the path with frequent glances behind him. Patrick looked down to check his footing and when he looked up again, Pete was gone. "Dammit, Pete!"

He put on a burst of speed. _Somebody needs to put that man in his place--_

What was not gone was the tree root that stuck partially out into the path. Patrick saw it a second after he spotted Pete's hoodie and made a Hail-Mary grab for it. Only by luck and the grace of generations of boy scouts flailing through the woods playing at being Davy Crockett did Patrick's hand land in the cup of Pete's hoodie and exert enough downward force that the zipper got stuck instead of released to let Pete run free in the woods in fewer clothes than usual.

_Sickening weightlessness._

_Screech of metal. Hard slam into the back of his head._

_No breath. Ears ringing. Pete's hands not just in the hole but everywhere on his body. Pete's lips at his ear. Patrickpatrickpatrick, pleasepleasepleasebeokay_

_Pleasedon'tleave--_

_\--me._

_Pleasedon'tleaveme._

Patrick landed on Pete this time. It was not the graceful pounce of a predator, not the efficient takedown of prey. It was a stumbling flail involving a tree root and a new hole in his ratty shoe and the lightspeed-fast thought that he was never going to go anywhere where he might get wet socks again. 

"Pete--wait!"

Pete tumbled backward, thumping into Patrick. Their legs got tangled up and they both landed on the wet mulch of the hiking trail. The scent of leaf mold and wood and mud and Petepetepete. _Oh he smells so good...strawberry like Red Vines_...

Patrick landed on the softness (relatively speaking) of Pete instead of hard ground, but it was still enough for strobe lights to go off behind his eyes.

_The scent of Red Vines. Cold on one side of his body and heat on the other. Something poking into the hole in his jeans near his hip and Pete needs to be put in his place--_

_A screech of metal. Sickening weightlessness._

"Patrick!"

_Don't leave me._

_A screech of--_ no, a croak, more like. A harsh croak from--from his own throat.

Solid weight beneath him. Pete's arms wrapped around him, holding him down from that sickening, out-of-control weightlessness.

"Patrick! I'm right here!" Pete's voice came from a million miles away to the tune of shattered glass.

Suddenly, he felt a warm tongue on his cheek as Pete licked him.

The strobing in his brain flickered and died. The scent of the woods came back, Pete and leaf litter and wood chips and cold.

"I'm right here. I didn't leave you." Pete murmured.

"I have to--I'm supposed to--you have to be in--" Patrick struggled with the words over his sudden shortness of breath. "I have to keep you safe! Put you--in your--in your--" He tasted bitter metal on the back of his tongue, underneath the Pete-pheromones that wrapped around him like home.

"I'm right here, just where I'm supposed to be, Rick." Pete licked him again. "With you."

Patrick was breathing through a straw. None of his air seemed to get to his lungs. "But--" he wheezed, "--but you--ran from--me--"

Pete's hands dug into his sides. Pete's thumb found the hole in his jeans near the rivet reinforcing the front pocket. Pete's fingers found their way into his pocket and tugged at the object there.

Cold plastic at his lips. "Breathe," Pete growled. He pushed the plunger down and Patrick breathed in automatically. The aerosol mist flooded his lungs and two breaths later, so did the rest of the air he was sucking down his windpipe.

While he breathed, Pete had crawled into his lap and locked his legs around Patrick's waist. Pete stroked the sides of his face, cupping his cheeks in gentle palms, running his fingers over Patrick's sideburns. He pressed his forehead against Patrick's, knocking his hat even further askew until it fell right off his head. "Patrick, Patrick, Patrick," he said. "I'm not running from you. I didn't leave you. I didn't leave. We're all okay." He breathed in time with Patrick. "I didn't run _from_ you. I want _you_ to run _with_ me."

"Run with you?" Since Pete had been stroking his face, Patrick had taken the opportunity to slide his hands up under Pete's hoodie, finding the warm skin of his bare back under the t-shirt. Pete was running hot and sweet, his pheromones surrounding Patrick like a warm blanket of need.

"Yeah." Pete cupped his face and stared into his eyes, forcing Patrick to cross his since their noses were almost touching. "Run with me, Trick. Be part of my heat the way I've always wanted my alpha to." He could still see Pete's mouth, though, and his teeth flashed white in the deep blue moonlight of the snow-covered forest landscape.

Patrick couldn't help but laugh, short and sardonic. "Dude. You _have_ met me, haven't you?" He scrambled for the inhaler that was trapped somewhere between them. "If you expect me to chase you down, you're in for a lonely heat." He buried his face in Pete's neck and breathed in. "I can't be that for you."

Pete licked him again. "Asshole."

Patrick drew back. "What?"

"You've already run with me part of the way, or was that epic road trip in the Cookiemobile something I only dreamed up?" Pete squirmed on his lap and Patrick suddenly became aware of the growing thickness in his crotch, even in the snow and soaking wet.

Pete scooted back and moved into a crouch, holding out both hands. "I don't want you to run after me. I want you to run _beside_ me. _You_ set the pace."

Patrick placed his hands in Pete's. "I--yeah--okay."

Pete pulled him up. "Look." He pointed through the trees. "Cabin Seven is that way. I can see the light."

"Cabin Seven? I pulled the key for Three, it's back that way." He pointed in the opposite direction.

"I reserved Seven this afternoon. I thought I might need it."

"Oh." Patrick ducked his head. How could he have read things so wrong? He was losing Pete and he didn't know how to hold him tight. "You want me to go--"

"I thought _we_ might need it." Pete laced his fingers through Patrick's and pulled him into the night.

Hold him tight.

Or don't.

"Oh."

**

Cabin Seven wasn't the luxury cabin. It was barely even a shed. "That's the point," Pete said, his voice low and growly as Patrick lit the kerosene lamps hanging from the low-slung rafters and brightening the room with warm, smelly light. "I don't want fancy. I remember that first time we met, Patrick. Do you?"

Patrick swallowed at Pete's voice in his ear. "Y-you pounced on me and knocked me out."

"Mmhm. Yup." Pete popped the last "p" in yup. "I dragged you back to my lair because you came too close."

Pete was too close in his ear. Patrick turned around to see Pete already stripping out of his hoodie and shirt. "This is that caveman thing, isn't it?" He was sore and achy and tired and he was certain his legs wouldn't go another step when Pete finally finished loping through the woods, finding clearings to see the sky (which wasn't clear anyway but rather lit up with a rusty glare reflected off the distant highway lights), and rubbing himself up against Patrick, then darting away and laughing. 

There were snowballs involved, and some of them ended up down the back of his shirt. It was worth the shortness of breath and the soreness in his leg muscles to see the trouble clear from Pete's face when he dashed back and forth. Like a happy puppy.

Now, though, Pete was a wolf and Patrick was on the menu. "Pete, I--"

"Hush. This is my lair, Tricky." Pete tugged at his jacket and the puffy vest. Before Patrick knew it, Pete's hands were at his belt as he backed Patrick up against the wall of the cabin next to the bed. "I've caught an alpha, and I'm ready to pounce."

The tiny part of Patrick inside jumped up and down. He picked me! He chose me! Yaay! He settled his hands lightly on Pete's waist, tickling the bare skin there. He touched his lips to Pete's jaw, the rough warmth there moving from Pete's skin to Patrick's insides. Pete's fingers closed around his as they both opened the button on Pete's jeans. "God, Pete--I wish I could be--"

"What?" Pete shoved his jeans and boxers down and kicked them off into a corner. He reached for Patrick's shirt with deft fingers and tossed it away to follow. "What, Trick?"

Patrick's mouth went dry. Pete was beautiful, and the kerosene lamps made him glow. Nevermind the headiness he was already feeling from pheromones, his best friend was a joy to gaze upon no matter what state Patrick's hormones were in. "I wish I knew how to be the alpha everybody thinks I should be."

Pete laughed, a sharp sound. "I don't." He maneuvered Patrick by the waistband of his jeans until the backs of Patrick's legs hit the edge of the rustic futon that was one of two pieces of furniture squeezed into the cabin space (the other being a small bureau next to it).

"But I can't--I don't want to hold you down, or take you in hand like everybody's expecting me to."

Pete undid his fly and wriggled his fingers into Patrick's jeans. "Good," he said. "You could try to take me down if that's what you want," he growled against Patrick's lips. "I'd go down for you."

"We'd go down swinging," Patrick murmured back when Pete's lips moved to his jaw, then down to his neck and into the crook of his shoulder. "You'd fight me and you'd win because I don't want to fight you."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Pete shoved his jeans down over his hips, binding up Patrick's knees. His boxers followed immediately after. 

Patrick lost his balance and tumbled backwards with a whump, which was exactly where Pete wanted him, he could tell by the feral gleam in Pete's eyes. He licked dry lips as Pete clambered on top of him, his hands seemingly everywhere. "Everything," Patrick said, his voice wavery. "You push me and everyone says I should take you in hand and it seems like you want it, too, sometimes."

Pete shrugged. "Maybe I do, sometimes."

Patrick swallowed thickly. "I'm afraid if I hold on too tight, I'll lose you." He looked away towards the smoky golden light of the lamp. "Even though I know you're not mine to lose."

Pete's fingers pressed against his cheek, turning him back to look into the smoky golden eyes in the beloved face above him. "But you're mine, Trick. I've caught you in my lair more than once now. You've growled for me, purred for me, built a nest for me, you've even run with me with the moon in our hair."

Pete's words wrapped around him, squeezing the sense out of him, drawing the breath away from his lungs, taking the yawning pit inside him and sealing it up.

"You're mine to keep, Trick." Pete lowered his head and sealed their mouths together.

**

Pete knew that Patrick would worry for all of Chicago if he let him. So he didn't let him. He could come up with more words for Patrick if he thought Patrick would listen to them. _I'm a loaded God complex. Cock me and pull me. Am I more than you bargained for yet?_

But Patrick sometimes overlooked all of Pete's words, even while he made them into music. So Pete left the words behind. Patrick was hot as fuck when he alpha'd all over a snooty hotel clerk, but he was twice as hot when he arched his back under Pete and begged in whispers as Pete kissed down his chest and held his wrists against the futon mattress.

Patrick didn't need a lot of words from him right now, and truthfully, Pete was kind of losing them anyway, thanks to heat hormones. "I snared me an alpha," he singsonged, off-key and out of tune, "Gonna fuck him until he can't run away from me."

Patrick's bright laugh did more to flood his insides than any growl he'd ever heard. He licked wet trails down around Patrick's nutsack, then blew on them to cool them down. 

"Pete, lemme touch, too," Patrick protested.

Pete slithered up his body, dragging his aching cock along the line of Patrick's thigh. He could feel his body quivering, opening up, slicking up. Feel the words slipping away in a hot cloud of need. 

But on his terms. "No," he said. "Mine."

Patrick lifted his head. His glasses lay crooked on the end of his nose, his arms spread out at his sides where Pete held his wrists, his legs splayed and his chest rising and falling with breathlessness. Pete had never seen a more fuckable Patrick than right that moment when Patrick bit his lip and nodded. 

Pete dragged his nails over the white skin of Patrick's hips and Patrick's head dropped back. "Ohgodohfuck--"

Pete straddled him. "Want your knot now, alpha." It might not have been the brightest move, to sink down on Patrick's cock without any prep besides what his heat was giving him, but there was something raw and primal in the stretch and burn as he lined up and Patrick breached his body.

"Pete--holyfuck--please--please move." Patrick's wide eyes were drowning pools. "God you're--"

Pete began to move, slow drag and hot friction. Patrick squirmed enough to free a hand, whose reverent fingers brushed Pete's bat-heart tattoo, stroked up his skin to his circle of thorns. His thumb brushed Pete's bottom lip and Pete bit down, then soothed with his tongue.

Patrick whimpered and Pete's mouth stretched in a smile. Pete wanted him quivering underneath him and begging to give his knot. "That good, baby?"

Patrick nodded. He started a purr deep in his chest that vibrated all the way up through Pete. "Fuck, Patrick--I didn't know you could do that!"

Patrick blinked owlishly. "Me neither." He pushed up on his elbows to a sitting position and wrapped his arms around Pete. "Can I--can you--"

"Mm-hmm." Pete locked his ankles around Patrick's waist as Patrick's clumsy thrusts found a rhythm. His cock was trapped between them and the friction between their bodies sent tremors through him. The swell of Patrick's cock inside him triggered his hormones and flooded his system with endorphins. Pete moved faster, his fingers slipping over Patrick's sweat-slick skin.

Patrick was making little whimpering noises, biting his lip until it was raw, breathing harsh through his nose every few breaths. "Pete? Please omega--I gotta--I don't know how much longer I can hold off. You gotta let me come."

Pete realized Patrick had been holding off for him. "God, Patrick. Touch me, _fuck_ me, give me your knot." He rested his forehead against Patrick's sweaty one. "You have no idea how amazing you are, how amazing you feel."

Patrick might have been a shaking hot mess, but he wrapped sure fingers around Pete's cock and jerked him slow and dirty, in between sloppy kisses that were more tongue than anything else. "I know I can't catch you." He swiped his thumb over the leaking tip and Pete saw stars for a half-second. "But I'll run with you."

Pete would have cried at that if he weren't coming his brains out. "Pleeeease--Patrick," he groaned. "Knot--please--alpha--"

"Pete!" Patrick locked up, his arms like a vise around Pete. His eyes rolled back in his head as he came. He fell backwards and Pete followed him down, gasping for the same breath as aftershocks jolted him in Patrick's death-grip. 

The dizzy, floaty afterglow folded him in a hazy mental blizzard punctuated by the pulses of Patrick's knot inside him. He came back to himself to Patrick's lips at his ear and half-coherent whispers. "Pete...don't leave...stay...choose me..."

He fell to the side, moving gingerly, one leg very awkwardly bent up between them (thank fuck he was limber and his entire lower half still tingled with pleasurable aftershocks). "Patrick?" he murmured. "Patrick," he repeated louder. "Hey, Trick!" He ran his fingers over Patrick's face, stroking the cut up high on his side burn and in his hairline.

Patrick grunted and clamped a hand around Pete's wrist. "Still coming."

Pete's mouth softened. "I know. I can feel it. Why do you think I'd leave?"

Patrick blinked. "I can't pin you down like a real alpha."

The haze blew away from Pete's brain. "Hey." His voice sounded too loud and too harsh to his own ears. "Let's get one thing straight, Patrick Stump. You are a real alpha and you fucking know this." The post-coital fog cleared in the heat of Pete's sudden anger. "Did Concordance blow smoke into your fucking brain?"

Patrick's face still registered fucked-out bliss, especially when Pete squirmed upright on top of him again, heedless of the knot still pulsing inside him. "You--you--provoke me sometimes." Patrick clamped a weak hand over his mouth. "'M'sorry. Not talking anymore." 

Well, heedless but not unaffected. Pete shuddered and a little involuntary moan escaped him, but not enough for him to lose focus. "No no no," he squeezed his thighs around Patrick's hips. "Elaborate, please, Mister Stump."

Patrick shook his head. Pete rolled his hips. Sure, it was dirty pool to be playing this way when Patrick's knot was still pulsing, but Patrick being weird and insecure--especially about his alpha-ness--was very much Pete's business as the omega in charge of things in this bed. He leaned down and licked Patrick's knuckles, then pried his fingers away from his mouth. "Talk to me."

Patrick whimpered, but his mouth started moving. "I want to give you what you want but I don't know what that is," he finally said. "Sometimes you act like you want me to hold you down but I don't know if--I mean, sometimes I want to, but--" He clamped his lips shut. "Forget it. I'm not making any sense and we shouldn't talk about this now."

"I beg to differ." Pete pinned his wrists above his head and leaned down so their noses touched. "Now is exactly the time to talk about it. When your filters are off and that mind of yours isn't preoccupied with saying what you think I want to hear." He searched Patrick's eyes. They were cloudy and troubled and Pete could almost read the thoughts behind them, but he needed Patrick to say the words. "I said I'd be okay if you wanted to go alpha on me."

"And you'd fight me. I don't want to fight you to fuck you because of our biology. I'm afraid that if I don't or if I can't--" His voice broke and he swallowed visibly, "--that you'll eventually find someone who can." His shoulders slumped. "I know I'm not enough--I can't keep up--I can't do it the right way!"

Pete bit him on the jaw. "Asshole," he said. "Then do it the Patrick way." He stroked the cut on Patrick's head. "I'd be okay if you wanted to go alpha on me because of you, not alpha-ness. I snared you, fair and square, little alpha dude. And this omega keeps what's his."

**

Okay, so. Patrick might have melted into a puddle at Pete's words. And he might have been overreacting to things after the crash because of a mild head injury. And he might think all these things were silly in the light of the morning after a good fuck and a long knot. Especially when driving back to town in the Cookiemobile with Pete tucked up next to him and the tricked-out golf cart handling better than their van on the snowy, slushy roads. Especially _especially_ when he and Pete walked into the diner and found Joe and Andy already there and eating pancakes and oatmeal.

"Lavinia took pity on us and drove out to get us last night. We had a lovely, warm, comfortable, luxurious night in our hotel room." Joe's words were muffled by a mouthful of pancake. "She's good people."

Lavinia brought them coffee as Patrick let Pete push him into the booth and slide in next to him on the outside. "That concert yesterday was awesome," she said. "Y'all pulled in about three grand for the sanctuary. That's enough to keep it going through the winter."

Pete beamed. It lit up the whole diner. And the insides of Patrick, too. "That's fucking cool, man. In the summer when we're back out on tour, we're gonna make it a point to swing by here for a proper show."

Lavinia high-fived him. "Maybe by then, we'll have an actual bar you guys can play instead of a mud pit."

"Oh, don't get fancy on our account," Andy deadpanned.

The van had been patched up, packed up, and released back into the wild. They sent Andy back in to check them all out of the hotel. After Pete's speed-run through the Concordance event, they figured the less the front desk staff saw Pete, the kinder they might be.

The van was parked out front of the main drag and the meter was about to run out when a red-headed minion came up on her bike. "Aunt Portia would like a word with you."

The four of them shared a look. This time, there were no questions asked. As they walked up the street, Pete muttered. "I swear these kids are a mafia gang. I could see them as the monsters in a horror flick, taking down grown-ass men with their feral little half-pint rage."

"How the mighty would fall," Joe quipped as they entered the bakery to find Aunt Portia by the counter waiting for them, "Behold the power of the cookie kid mafia."

"Never underestimate the usefulness of a pack of feral little gremlins," Aunt Portia replied. "Especially when they're your sister's grandkids and take baked goods as payment. I wanted to thank you boys as well." She gestured to four boxes sitting on the display case. "It might not be as much of a thrill to receive baked goods as payment when you're of age, but I think you know the worth in something that's made for who you are, rather than who everyone thinks you should be." 

"Are you kidding?" Joe said. "This is awesome!"

Her merry, dancing eyes rested on Pete for a moment, then slid to Patrick.

It surprised the hell out of Patrick to see Pete step forward when she opened her arms for a hug. "Gave you a scent, not a collar," she murmured. Patrick was close enough to hear and made a note to ask Pete about the odd phrase later.

She hugged each of them in turn. "In a world full of growls, keep purring," she said to Patrick.

Joe and Andy got pronouncements as well. "You are more than enough, Joe. Never doubt that. Andy, the steady rock rests on solid ground." She drew back. "Now off you go, with the moon in your hair."

**  
Back on the road, Patrick was tucked up against the window again. The upholstery still had a hole in it from where the twisted metal went through, but he had a pillow tucked up against the seat back. 

"Hey, Tricky, why don't you come over here," Pete said, patting the seat next to him.

Then he reached over and stuck his finger into the hole in Patrick's jeans near the pocket rivet.

Patrick's lip curled up and he lunged towards Pete. "Somebody needs to put you in your place." 

"On top of you? I'm game, but I think Joe and Andy will excommunicate us." Nevertheless, Pete clambered on top of him and dug his fingers into Patrick's sides. "PatrickPatrick _Paaatrick!_ "

"No! Nonono!" Patrick squirmed helplessly as Pete's cold fingers found their way under his jacket and into his soft parts and tender bits, teasing out tickles and giggles without mercy. "Help!"

"Don't make me turn this van around," Andy growled.

Patrick wrapped his arms around his omega and shoved him to the middle seat, then pulled him up next to him. "Warm up my cold side. Hold me tight."

Pete dug his fingers into Patrick's squishy sides again. Patrick curled up protectively as another fit of helpless giggles overcame him. "Not like that!"

Pete grinned. "Hold me tight, Trickster." 

Patrick hauled him up against his side. "Or don't."

THE END...OR NOT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays to the fandom! And a special thank you to the Peterick Creations Challenge discord for helping brainstorm and commiserating and providing Hallmark movie plot generators to enable this silliness. HUGE thank yous go out to the PCC mods/showrunners, who organized the fuck out of this and who bust ass to provide the fandom with seasonal content, themes, and a steady flow of quality fiction to feed our obsessions. It is not easy herding cats.
> 
> Special shout-out to @rainbowmatic-stumpomatic on Tumblr for their incredible moodboards. I toss out a random couple of words and they give me beautiful moodboard art that practically reads my mind. If you liked this fic, you should send them a thank you via ask.
> 
> And a very happy holiday goes to my chief enablers, to whom this fic is dedicated: @laudanumcafe and @littlesnowpea (@smalltalktorture over on tumblr). I barfed up a hairball of words for you. It was a hairball of love. I hope it doesn't suck.
> 
> I discovered a few things while writing this puppy: 1.) doing this on a cell phone with shitty connections is objectively HARD. I mean, I thought I had a big screen on my phone, but it is damn hard to highlight and transfer huge blocks of text and fill out fields while squinting in the back of a car on a highway in the dark, even with the help of a bluetooth keyboard. 2.) bluetooth keyboards aren't as helpful as you'd think when you type faster than the signal. But they do make you really think about the words you want to write.
> 
> Oh, and 3.) I love everyone in this bar and Pete Wentz. And Patrick Stump and Andy Hurley and Joe Trohman--may they never encounter this fic in any way, shape, or form. (hit the goddamn back button, Pete!)


End file.
